design

There comes a time when your movable type becomes so over-used that you no longer get a legible print off of the printing press. For months now we’ve been at work on a new site design that maintains the essence of Hackaday while ejecting the 10-year-old dregs of the site. With each small success we’ve actually ruined ourselves on viewing the old design. It is with great relief that we unveil a site design built specifically for Hackaday’s needs.

The most notable change is in the content of our landing page. For ten years, loading Hackaday.com resulted in the most recent blog posts. The blog concept is proven, but provides little opportunity to highlight quality original content and information about upcoming events. We have tried the use of “sticky” posts but honestly I find them somewhat annoying. The solution to this is not immediately apparent, but I feel we have found the most efficient solution to our complex set of needs..

We have a lot of community members who participate in Hackaday in numerous ways. Changes found in this design are driven by that fact. The landing page will, from this point forward, be a somewhat more persistent collection of notable content from the blog, our community site (hackaday.io), as well as news regarding live events, store features, contest highlights, and more. Those hard-core fans — a label I also assign to myself — will find the same reading experience as always on the new blog URL: hackaday.com/blog.

Aesthetically, we hope that all will agree the new design far supersedes the old. There was a lot to fix, and the work of the Hackaday crew who designed and implemented this new interface is truly amazing. I hope you will take the time to leave a positive comment about their work. As with any major transition, there will be some bumps in the road. Right now most of our sidebar widgets have not been migrated but that and any other problems will be fixed soon.

In this design we strived to highlight the title and image of each post to immediately convey the core concepts of the projects shown here. The author by-line and comment count remain core to the presentation of the articles, and our link style continues to be immediately apparent in the body of each article. I think we have far surpassed the readability of the comments section, in addition to the content itself. We knew we could rebuilt it… we have the technology… long live articles worth reading.

UPDATE: We are working very hard to fix all the parts that don’t look quite right. Thanks for your patience!

UPDATE 2: Infinite scrolling isn’t a feature, it’s a regression. On our test server all the blog listings were paginated just like always. When our host, WordPress VIP, pushed live the infinite scrolling manifested itself. We’ve filed a ticket with them and are hoping for a solution shortly.

UPDATE 3: Infinite scrolling has now been fixed and the blog layout now paginates. The mouse-over zoom effect has been removed. Slideshow speed has been adjusted and if you hover you mouse over a feature it will pause the scrolling.

For the last few weeks we’ve mostly been improving our current PCBs and case design for the production process to go smoothly. The final top PCB shown above has been tweaked to improve his capacitive touch sensing capabilities, you may even see a video of the system in action in the Mooltipass project log on hackaday.io. We’ve also spent some time refining the two most popular card art designs so our manufacturers may print them correctly. We’ll soon integrate our updated USB code (allowing the Mooltipass to be detected as a composite HID keyboard / HID generic) into the main solution which will then allow us to work on the browser plugin.

It’s also interesting to note that we recently decided to stop using the GPL-licensed avrcryptolib. Our current project is CDDL licensed, allowing interested parties to use our code in their own project without forcing them to publish all the remaining code they created. The GPL license enforces the opposite, we therefore picked another AES encryption/decryption implementation. This migration was performed and checked by our dedicated contributor [Miguel] who therefore ran the AES NESSIE / CTR tests and checked their output, in less than a day.

We’re about to ship the first Mooltipass prototypes to our active contributors and advisers. A few weeks later we’ll send an official call for beta testers, just after we shown (here on Hackaday) what the final product looks like. Don’t hesitate to ask any question you may have in the comments section, you can also contact us on the dedicated Mooltipass Google group.

The Hackaday writers and readers are currently working hand-in-hand on an offline password keeper, the Mooltipass. A few days ago we presented Olivier’s design front PCB without even showing the rest of his creation (which was quite rude of us…). We also asked our readers for input on how we should design the front panel. In this new article we will therefore show you how the different pieces fit together in this very first (non-final) prototype… follow us after the break!

We’re sure that many of Hackaday readers already know that one of the two main components of the Mooltipass project is a smart card, containing (among others) the AES-256 encryption key. Two weeks ago we asked if you’d be interested coming up with a design that will be printed on the final card. As usual, many people were eager to contribute and recently sent us a few suggestions. If you missed the call and would like to join in, it’s not too late! You may still send your CMYK vector image at mathieu[at]hackaday[dot]com by sunday. More detailed specifications may be found here.

In a few days we’ll also publish on Hackaday a project update, as we recently received the top and bottom PCBs for Olivier’s design. The low level libraries will soon be finished and hopefully a few days later we’ll be able to ship a few devices to developers and beta testers. We’re also still looking for contributors that may be interested in helping us to develop browser plugins.

The Mooltipass team would also like to thank our dear readers that gave us a skull on Hackaday projects!

[Miguel] finished the AES encryption/decryption schemes (using AES in CTR mode) and wrote an awesome readme which explains how everything works and how someone may check his code using several standardized tests. We highly encourage readers to make sure that we didn’t make any mistake, as it was one of you that suggested we migrate to CTR mode (thanks [mate]!).

On the hardware side, we launched into production the top & bottom PCBs for Olivier’s design. We’re also currently looking for someone that has many Arduino shields to make sure that they can be connected to the Mooltipass. A few days ago we successfully put the Arduino bootloader inside our microcontroller and made the official Arduino Ethernet shield work with it.

Finally, as you may have guessed from the picture above our dear smart card re-sellers can pretty much print anything on them (these are samples). If one of you is motivated to draw something, please contact me at mathieu[at]hackaday.com!

At one point in history, blueprints were actually blue. Now, if you even see a dead tree version of plans or assemblages, they’re probably printed off with a plotter or large format printer. You can, however, make your own blueprints at home, as [Tyler] shows us in his Hackaday Project.

Back in the olden days, master drawings were traced onto large sheets of transparent film. These master prints were then laid over paper prepared with Potassium Ferricyanide and Ferric Ammonium Citrate to create an insoluble Prussian Blue background for the prints. Developing is easy – just expose the transparent positive and undeveloped paper to UV light, in the form of fluorescent bulbs or the sun.

[Tyler] began his blueprint creation process by getting a few design sketches of the RSI Aurora and Nautilus, editing them on a computer, and printing them out on transparency sheets. A solution of equal parts Potassium Ferricyanide and Ferric Ammonium Citrate were painted onto a piece of paper and allowed to dry. Exposing was a simple matter of laying the transparency over the undeveloped paper and setting it out in the sun for 20 minutes or so. After that, it’s a simple matter of washing off the unexposed chemicals and letting the newly created blueprint dry.

It’s a simple technique, but also very, very cool. Not exactly practical, given a plotter can spit out an architectural or assembly drawing of any building, vehicle, or device in a few minutes, but just the ticket for art pieces or extremely odd engineers.